Those self-appointed guardians of world culture, the
international functionaries at the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, surely know that
popular folklore story, the Tar-Baby. It figures in over 200 tales
in societies of all races, ancient and modern, from West Africa to
South America and Asia. In America it was told most memorably by
Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus yarn about Br’er
Rabbit, the cottontail entrapped by Br’er Fox with a sticky doll
made of tar and turpentine.
In all versions it is a cautionary tale about the danger
of tacky situations that only get worse and entangling the more
they are grappled with. As a bearer of universal, age-old wisdom,
it is worthy of being included in UNESCO’s famous list of the
world’s intangible heritage, right along with, say, Sbek Thom Khmer
shadow theatre and the Mongol Biyelgee.
But whimsical folk tales are one thing, harsh reality is
another. Now UNESCO is struggling to detach itself from a real-life
Tar-Baby. It takes the form of the $3 million Obiang
Nguema Mbasogo International Prize for Research in the Life
Sciences, set up by UNESCO with his money in 2008. For those who
may not have seen “The
United Nations’ Rogue Agency” in the February American
Spectator, the story to date:
The donor, President Obiang, is the brutal dictator of a
tiny, oil-rich African nation, Equatorial Guinea — the 11th most
corrupt country in the world, according to the 2011 corruption
index kept by Transparency International. His colossal personal
fortune makes him one of the world’s richest rulers. Sensing that
some cynics might see impropriety in this, since his countrymen get
by on about $1 dollar a day, he sought to whitewash his image by
having UNESCO name a prize for him. Lured by this $3 million
Tar-Baby, the organization readily accepted Br’er Obiang’s money
four years ago.
Many countries, including the U.S., opposed the prize.
Senator Patrick Leahy, for one, has warned Director General Irina
Bokova that “It is likely that the $3 million prize itself was the
product of corruption or theft from the public treasury,” and said
it was a serious mistake for UNESCO to associate itself with
Obiang. Nobel laureates and human rights defenders around the world
also protested. Belatedly realizing its mistake, an embarrassed
UNESCO clumsily suspended the prize and began trying to get the tar
off its hands. It did what bureaucracies usually do: it created a
committee to discuss the problem.
Meanwhile, investigations in the U.S. and France make
clear just how compromisingly sticky UNESCO’s Tar-Baby
is.
As long ago as 2004, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations began looking into President Obiang’s financial
dealings in the U.S. It found that he and close family members
controlled tens of millions of petrodollars in American banks. In
2010, it issued a 325-page report zeroing in on how his prodigal
playboy son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorin, moved
more than $100 million into the U.S. Not one to put his cash into
mousy savings accounts, he laundered it via shell companies with
names like Beautiful Vision and Sweet Pink, and spent it on
trinkets like a $30 million compound in Malibu, where he had
attended Pepperdine University. Last October the Justice Department
went to court to seize some $70 million of his U.S. assets
including the mansion, a Gulfstream jet, luxury cars, and a million
dollars worth of Michel Jackson memorabilia.
Could a United Nations agency like UNESCO not have known
the kind of people it was partnering with?
Or that in France, the organization’s home turf,
investigating magistrates have been looking into Obiang’s brimming
bank accounts and luxury assets, suspecting that they result from
embezzlement, money-laundering, and other misuse of public funds?
(He’s in good company: also suspected are his dodgy African
neighbors, Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso, and Gabon’s late
President Omar Bongo Ondimba.) In 2010, a French appeals court
authorized the investigations involving the three heads of state
and their relatives. Relatives like Teodorin.
Imagine then UNESCO’s chagrin when last September French
police raided Teodorin’s six-story, 5,000-square-foot Paris mansion
on Avenue Foch and towed away 11 cars from its garages and cobbled
courtyard, including a Maserati, a Porsche Carrera, an
Aston Martin and a Mercedes Maybach. Also two Bugatti Veyrons, the
most expensive and fastest street car in the world, costing over $1
million apiece. But the tenacious French investigators hadn’t
finished. The cops returned February 14 with a moving van and
emptied the mansion of Rodin statues and other baubles worth an
estimated $24 million. Equatorial Guinea’s local lawyer sputtered
that the building benefits from diplomatic immunity. Indeed,
President Obiang only last October named his son deputy permanent
representative to —what else? — UNESCO, obviously intending to
give him immunity from corruption charges. That’s unlikely to wash
with French authorities.
That UNESCO teams up with such strange bedfellows does not
seem to worry the Obama Administration. For months it has been
trying to get Congress to waive or change the law, dating from the
1990s, that obliged the U.S. to cut off funding to any UN agency
that admitted the Palestinian Authority as a full member, as UNESCO
provocatively did last October.
Now the State Department has quietly included some $79
million in its new budget to cover its UNESCO contribution for FY
2013. “The President has also articulated quite clearly that he
would like a waiver to allow us to participate in UNESCO,” said
Thomas Nides,Deputy Secretary for Management and
Resources at State, on February 13. “We have put the money in the
budget, realizing that we’re not going to be able to spend the
money unless we get the waiver, and we have made it clear to the
Congress we’d like a waiver.… UNESCO does a lot of enormously good
work.” One can only admire State’s chutzpah.
One who does not is Congresswoman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Committee on
Foreign Affairs. “Resuming U.S. funding would give a green light
for other UN bodies to follow in UNESCO’s footsteps and support the
Palestinian statehood push,” she declared, reacting to State’s
ploy. It “sends a disastrous message that the U.S. will fund UN
bodies no matter what irresponsible decisions they make.” Adds
Brett Schaefer of the Heritage Foundation, “These efforts are
beyond shortsighted.”
Meanwhile, UNESCO’s 18-member committee labors mightily to
find some way, any way, to get rid of the Obiang Tar-Baby. Whatever
it does, its hands will stay tarred.
One solution, suggested by President Obiang, still
lobbying hard to have the prize awarded, is to remove his name and
endow it in the name of Equatorial Guinea. A committee insider
tells me that won’t fly. Another idea is to temporize for a year,
which should be easy for a UNESCO committee; the prize has a
five-year time limit and will expire in 2013 if not awarded by
then. But the favored solution at this point apparently is to
create a new scientific award, named neither for Obiang nor his
country, and accept contributions from any government. Given the
kind of people UNESCO has shown it is willing to receive money
from, that could produce the mother of all Tar-Babies. Anybody need
their money laundered in Paris?
